Countryside Dalliance

Sally Beauman's first novel, Destiny, won her
a record-breaking advance and a phalanx of female fans. Now she tells Marianne
Brace why less is more

Back in the days of power suits and
shoulder-pads, bookshop dump-bins groaned under the weight of a particular type
of fiction. Romantic novelists with big hair and bigger advances were cornering
the market in blockbusters so huge, they could knock a man senseless. Whether
they were taking Manhattan, finding prime time or getting lewd in lace, their
S&F fantasies sold millions.

Into that arena glided a writer whose debut
novel famously eclipsed all the raunch that went before. Black stockings and
killer heels were so early Eighties. In Destiny, a starlet got
seriously sexy in diamonds - clipped to her labia majora. Not only that, but
the author Sally Beauman won herself a glittering advance of $1m, the largest
ever for a first novel.

While those other bestsellers soon seemed as
flat as yesterday's champagne, with Destiny, The New York Times wondered
whether the romantic novel had reached its ultimate destination. For Sally was
no Shirley or Joan. She tweaked the genre to create the kind of romantic
fiction you might expect from a Cambridge bluestocking - sophisticated, packed
with cultural and historical references, and a rattling read.

Dark Angel followed. Completely compelling and
often shocking, it was superior to and less sprawling than Destiny. A
confection of historical family saga, murder mystery and country house novel,
its pages seemed to turn themselves. Now both Destiny and Dark
Angel have been reissued. Instead of the original and - according to
Beauman - "unspeakably vulgar" black and silver covers, tastefully neutral
designs are pitching to a new generation of readers.

Beauman still has the pearls and glamorous mane of
hair but, over the years, there has been a perceptible shift in her writing. "I
think my books have got better," she says. "Destiny does fit within a
genre, though it fits uncomfortably. Dark Angel stepped away from it.
The more I've written, the freer I've felt."

Rebecca's Tale, her sensitive and intelligent
sequel to Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, sold more than 50,000 copies in
hardback and won enthusiastic reviews. Beauman's latest offering, The
Landscape of Love (Little, Brown, £14.99), shares many themes with
her earlier works - sexual thralldom, child abuse, unrequited love, being an
outsider - but it's more ambitious. "I wanted to look at how we damage other
people, particularly those we love, and the damage we do to our environment,"
Beauman explains. The action is set in Suffolk in 1967 and in London, 23 years
later. The Mortland sisters live with their mother and grandfather in a
decaying ancestral home, a medieval abbey. Their lives are about to change
irrevocably.

Love in its many forms is explored. So too is memory
and its deceptions. The abbey has a medieval Squint. With the restricted vision
but opportunities for voyeurism it affords, this oblique architectural opening
acts as a metaphor for the way we see things. There is a mystery, never
explained, and the revelation of secrets. "I dislike answers," says Beauman
teasingly, "But I like questions."

Beauman began writing fiction almost by chance. As a
bet, she had a go at a Mills & Boon romance. She doesn't really like
talking about it because, she says: "The minute you have that badge attached to
you, you never get rid of it."

Initially treating the whole exercise as a joke,
Beauman gained from the experience. "For the first three chapters the story
went along quite well. Then it fell down this huge narrative pit." She laughs
throatily: "I had absolutely no idea at all what was going to happen." She
learnt about characterisation and "placing a story". Using a pseudonym gave her
the confidence to experiment. But the love affair didn't last. "After a bit, I
really disliked the constrictions. I couldn't bear that it always had to be
from the female point of view and I don't like happy endings."

Leaving behind the passive passions of that
particular genre, Beauman went for the kind of heroines who took life and their
men by the balls. The novelist Linda Grant once commented that no one wrote sex
better than Sally Beauman. Even so, "I got hit over the head very hard for
Destiny," remarks the author crisply. "The assumption was the sex had
been written as a kind of extra in order to sell it, which was far from the
case. It's absolutely central to the novel." Sex equals power. It's so key to
the tale that there are only 16 pages before the first fellatio gets going.
Beauman says that: "I've never understood the idea that you should siphon off
this one subject and not write about it in exactly the same way as you would
anything else."

The extent of the hoo-hah, however, took her by
surprise. It was only when she got half-way through Destiny that she had
shown the 400 pages to her agent. While on holiday she forgot about them. "The
next thing I knew this really extraordinary auction took place.

"What I like about writing is the anonymity of it but
the whole process became intensely public. I had just wanted to see if I could
write something popular. Suddenly the phone rings about 45 times a day with
people banging on about dollars. I really, really hated it." It can't be easy
to complete a manuscript knowing what sort of sales figures are expected for
such an advance.

"I don't know how I ever managed to finish it. Now I
never sell a book until I've written it. I don't do a deal and I don't do an
advance." Financial freedom bought Beauman creative freedom. Rebecca's
Tale was the result of an enduring fascination with Du Maurier, whom she
regards as "a far greater and darker novelist than she has been given credit
for." Rebecca's pull for many readers is its retrospection.

There's something of this too in The Landscape of
Love. What happens to the Mortlands can be regarded as part of a much
longer story. Beauman's ancient abbey in the imagined village of Wykenfield has
survived the Reformation, industrial revolution and war. "The history of a
country is embodied in this place."

Beauman is interested in how that landscape has
altered over the past 50 years: "There is a kind of poisoning that is going
on." She set the novel in Constable country, being curious about the idea of
Englishness and intrigued that The Hay Wain was once voted the nation's
favourite painting.

It's sometimes hard to see behind such idealised
images. While she regrets crops being drenched in pesticides and the uprooting
of hedgerows, she has no patience with nostalgia. Looking at Constable's
canvas, Beauman can't help thinking of the working conditions of the men who
loaded the hay or the children once paid a pittance to stand all day as human
scarecrows in the fields beyond. "You cannot put the clock back. Thank God!"

The Landscape of Love boasts as many patterns
as tilled farmland seen from the air. There are three siblings, three men
fascinated by them, three narrative voices. Beauman has also used tarot cards
as a structuring device. Is she a believer? She laughs and shakes her head but
doesn't dismiss it entirely. What attracts her is that the cards have no fixed
interpretation. Their ambiguity offers an example of how when we try to pin
down the truth it shifts and evades us.

Language, too, has that slippery quality, yet words
shape the way we think. The first narrative belongs to 13-year-old Maisie.
Deformed, possibly autistic, obsessed with lists, she speaks to the dead as
casually as she talks to her family. The middle section is an extended riff by
Daniel. Romany-born, he graduates from Cambridge and ends up in advertising,
industry of the quick fix. If Maisie is an outsider because of her strangeness,
Daniel is set apart by class and education. He's self-deceiving,
self-destructive and as toxic as the nitrates leaching into the fields of his
childhood. The third viewpoint is that of the oldest sister, Julia, a lifestyle
guru who promotes food that is more about fashion than sustenance.

If Beauman has refined her craft, there is one thing
that hasn't changed. She knows the importance of plot. "It's the fuel. It's
what draws the reader on." Beauman reads three hours a day, every day, without
fail. "I have the time. Most people are lucky if they have three hours a week."
Her novels are now half the length they once were; you don't need an extra
handbag to carry one around. The block is busted. Less is definitely more.

Biography: Sally Beauman Born in Devon in 1944,
Sally Beauman was brought up in Bristol. After graduating in English literature
from Cambridge University, she lived in America, working as a journalist on New
York magazine. On returning to the UK, she won the Catherine Pakenham Award for
young journalists and became the Daily Telegraph magazine's arts editor. She is
the author of Destiny, an international bestseller, and also Dark Angel, Lovers
and Liars, Danger Zones, Sextet, Rebecca's Tale and The Landscape of Love,
published by Little, Brown next week. Her non-fiction includes The Royal
Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades. She is married to the actor Alan
Howard; they have a son and a grandchild. She divides her time between London,
Gloucestershire and the Hebrides.